Wednesday, December 02, 2015

People often ask me why I’ve
spent so much time in Boston over the years. They usually follow up by asking
why I haven’t moved there yet (to which I usually reply “Do you have a high-paying
job waiting for me up there?”) And the distinct intimation that I have a
clandestine wife and kids stowed away in Harvard Square always hovers in the
air as well. For the last sixteen odd years, my serious answer to that first
question has largely involved my long-term attendance at the Annual Boston
24-Hour Science Fiction Marathon, a weekend long haven for cinematic junkies
held every Presidents’ Day weekend. And since 2004, it’s also included extended
summer sojourns that served as escapes from and were financed by my former
career as a High School English Teacher.

But the real why’s behind those
answers stretch back much farther and burrow much deeper. My love affair with
the Commonwealth began on Saturday August 13th, 1988 while watching
the Red Sox lay a 16-4 drubbing on the Detroit Tigers, a win that brought their
American League record home winning streak to 25 games. Appropriately enough,
that winning streak ended the day after I became a fan, but for one reason or
another, even though I had been an Oakland A’s fan before (shudder….man the
things that a youthful Mark McGwire fanship can do to a guy), I saw something
that day in the Olde Towne Team that completely hooked me.

Maybe that something was the harmonious
siren song of past glories and abject despair that emanated from Yawkey Way
from 1918 until 2004. Following that haunting song straight into the cliffs of
epic collapses and late season choke jobs seemed like somewhat of a badge of
honor for an impressionable youth like yours truly, the prospect of groggily
repeating the key numbers of Sox lore in the aftermath (“1918, 1946, 1967,
1975, 1978, nineteen….eighty….six….”) akin to passing along secrets of near
Kabbalistic import to those landlocked observers who chose not to dip their
toes in the mad seas populated by monsters like the Great and Powerful Buckyfuckingdent.
As I once noted to a minister friend, I absorbed more Catholic guilt in nine
years of Lutheran grade school than in four years of Catholic high school; the
profound sense of puritanical suffering inherent in Red Sox fandom merely
served as a further conduit to a psychological country I already knew well.

But shame, guilt, and Bill
Buckner weren’t the only allure that Red Sox Nation (although we didn’t call it
that before the marketing and branding blitz that arrived with the current ownership
group) held for me. There was also the deeply embedded sense of tradition. In
that most tradition-centric of major American sports, the Red Sox stood out as a
historian’s dream. Sure, they were the last team to integrate (the immortal
Pumpsie Green and his .246 career batting average), they always seemed to build
lackluster teams around transcendent players (Ted, Yaz, Roger, Pedro), and even
when they fielded a monster squad they ended up running into an even more
formidable opponent (see that ’75 series against the Big Red Machine.) But
experiencing these failures smack dab in the middle of the birthplace of
America, in a city that refused to abandon its strong melting pot ethos and
ethnic enclaves while still clinging to the legacy power of the Boston Brahmins….that
backdrop seemed to imbue those epic collapses with a sense of much greater
importance. This was the team that rejected the cookie cutter multi-purpose
stadiums of the ‘60s and ‘70s in order to maintain the mystique of the “lyric
little bandbox of a ballpark” (as Updike famously put it) that is Fenway Park. The
clean, classic simplicity of the uniforms also carried a certain timelessness,
a continuum along which fans of all generations could plant their flags. They
were much better than those damn Yankee pinstripes, which always resembled the
conservative suits endemic of the button down, corporate philosophy of the New
York dynasty.

And the Sox were the most literary
team in all of baseball, maybe even in all of sports! To a kid who always read
at an advanced level and was a voracious consumer of literature of all stripes,
this was a familiar language. Baseball writers were more likely to quote Samuel
Johnson and Ernest Hemingway than their more workmanlike peers, and the Sox
drew erudite scribes to them like no other team. Esteemed mainstream authors
loved to write about them (see that aforementioned Updike piece, a chronicle of
Ted Williams’s last home game.) After all, this was a team steeped in pathos
and tragedy, doomed to a Fitzgeraldian purgatory of stretching out their arms
toward the green light of an always unreachable championship…or at least they
were fertile ground on which authors could plant the seeds of such a mythos. At
times, it became hard to discern the difference. It’s much more romantic of a
notion to believe that your team is fated to Sisyphean torture than to admit
that alienating minority players for decades, lowballing star players, and
employing a Cro-Magnon team building philosophy that only zoomed into present
day reality in 2002 is the reason that no championship banners were raised in
the Fens for 86 years.

I’ve been talking a lot about the
Red Sox, and some of you are probably wondering when I’m going to get around to
the film that this essay is supposed to center around. But the Sox are Boston, and everything attractive
about them has also been why I’ve loved the city for so long. It’s
hyper-traditional like few other modern American metropolises, yet the collegiate
atmosphere lends it a sense of ever-renewing progressivism and intellectual heft.
Visiting Boston always feels mentally stimulating, even as it always remains
familiar on many levels. And I love that, because (to steal the Kierkegaard
quote used to great effect in Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter) life can only be understood backwards, but it must be
lived forwards.

This fall has seen a cinematic referendum
of sorts on Boston’s long-standing romance with tradition, and on the dark side
of that affair. Scott Cooper’s Black Mass
presents a scathing examination of Whitey Bulger’s South Boston criminal
empire, much of which was enabled by fellow Southie boy and FBI agent John
Connolly and the blind eye he turned to the carnage around him. In The Departed, Jack Nicholson’s Bulger
surrogate carries a wild charisma which papers over many of his sins, but
Johnny Depp’s steely-eyed Whitey is a monstrous ethical vacuum, the rascally
kid from the down the street turned murderous sociopath. Black Mass may be a biopic of a criminal life, but its larger
portrait is one of the system (both formalized and complicit) that enabled one
man to maintain his empire for decades. In one of the film’s most chilling
scenes, Whitey’s State Senator brother Billy preaches the good gospel of
community and tradition at the St. Patrick’s Day parade, his speech ultimately
serving as voiceover for the images of his brother looming on the sidewalk, graft
and murder hiding in plain sight, protected by a conspiracy of silence that
owes as much to Boston’s insular history as it does to a shotgun and a bribe.

That conspiracy is writ large in
Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, albeit in
service to a more devastating crime that knows no romanticism in the popular
consciousness. Outside of his nascent directing career, McCarthy is best known
to many as a character actor extraordinaire. One of his signature roles has
been that of Baltimore Sun serial
fabricator Scott Templeton in the final season of The Wire, so it’s both deliciously ironic and wholly appropriate
that his latest directorial effort is a paean to the power of old school,
traditional journalism (and to the art of getting it right, as they say) and
how, in the form of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation team, it blew
apart the long term sexual abuse cover-up by the Catholic Diocese in Boston.

This time of year brings out
award bait films like wolves stalking their prey, so it’s natural to look at a
SERIOUS ISSUES offering like Spotlight
with some measure of skepticism. Dramatic recreations of well-known historical
events often become rote exercises in repetition, but what McCarthy and his
team achieve here is altogether compelling and absorbing, a slow burn thriller
whose awful power eventually envelops the viewer, no matter the previous
knowledge they might have of the case’s finer details.

Much of that power is derived
from the murderer’s row of a cast that McCarthy has assembled. Mark Ruffalo
shines as the dogged, mildly obsessive Mike Rezendes, whose idealistic
determination proves to be the heart and soul of Spotlight’s efforts to expose
the church’s crimes. Ruffalo’s charm has always laid in his everyman demeanor;
he’s handsome enough to flirt with leading man credibility, but an audience
never imagines him jetting off to an Italian villa in his spare time ala George
Clooney. And he’s used this sly charm to great effect, whether in big budget
fare like The Avengers or in the slew
of indies in which he essays genial hipsters with wit and grace. The nearest corollary
to his work in Spotlight is his turn
as Dave Toschi in David Fincher’s Zodiac,
another lonely man consumed by a labyrinthine investigation. In both, he
submerges his charm beneath a schlubby veneer, but he ends up being one of the
most likeable, compassionate characters on the screen. He lends Rezendes a
childlike vulnerability tempered by a righteous rage that explodes in a
climactic scene in which he cuts through Globe
politics and protocol to remind his colleagues that “they (the church) did this
to kids”; that everyman quality allows him to serve as audience surrogate, and
the effect here is devastating.

Ruffalo and his fellow castmates
are greatly abetted by McCarthy and DP Masanobu Takayanagi’s decision to work
in a subdued visual style, allowing the performances to stretch out and
breathe. Liev Schreiber usually underplays roles to great effect, but his turn
here as new Editor in Chief Marty Baron is an outstanding display of
internalization. He’s arguably the most mild-mannered character in the film,
but in defiance of the charismatic hero archetype, he ends up being the prime
mover behind the search for justice. Rachel McAdams has flashed a wide-eyed,
youthful innocence in many of her roles, a trait that greatly benefits her work
as Sacha Pfeiffer, whose reckoning with her heavily Catholic upbringing slowly
builds to a quietly heartbreaking scene in which her deeply religious
grandmother first reads the Spotlight expose. And while John Slattery’s Ben
Bradlee Jr. begins the film as a spiritual brother to Mad Men’s Roger Sterling, the conflicted and pragmatic motivations
that the actor shades the character with lend him a great sense of gravitas and
sympathy.

Michael Keaton’s work as
Spotlight chief “Robby” Robinson is one of the most intriguing facets of the
film. Tim Burton once noted that he cast Keaton as Batman in part because of the
look in his eyes, that manic energy that could outclass more physically
imposing candidates for the role. And Keaton has excelled over the years
playing loose cannons; much of the appeal of his comeback role in Birdman laid in the interior conflict
between seething anger and self-control within Riggan Thomson. Which makes his
turn in Spotlight such a multi-layered,
almost hypnotic performance. While Ruffalo gets the emotional outbursts and
nervous tics, Keaton is forced to be the voice of reason, the analytically
minded commander of his crew. As a result, even though he’s given less flashy,
actorly moments, the quiet intensity in those eyes is still there throughout.
When he finally has to put pressure on a longtime lawyer friend to name names,
and especially when he realizes that he muffed the handling of key case
information while a novice Metro editor years before, the panoply of his
subdued emotions is as impressive and moving as what he’s displayed in much
showier roles.

The presence of the 9/11 terror
attacks three quarters of the way through the film provides a historically
accurate speed bump for the Spotlight investigation, but it also serves as a
large-scale metaphor for the film’s central message, which is also David Simon’s
mission in The Wire: the failure of
institutions. As one sexual abuse victim testifies early in the film, so many
of his fellow victims came from poor, dysfunctional families that the attention
paid to them by the church seemed an oasis in a life of pain. The annihilation
of that faith in God’s foot soldiers drives the victims into lives dominated by
drug abuse, alcoholism, and deep depression. The world’s nominal force for good
is not even strong enough to root out the evil within. In the years following
9/11, the steadily eroding faith in public institutions that gained major
momentum at the conclusion of the Nixon years reached peak mode with the
revelations of mishandled intelligence, ghost WMDs in Iraq, torture programs in
distant lands, cataclysmic malfeasance on Wall Street. And one of the greatest examples
of institutional collapse in the midst of all of this era has resided in the
journalism world, as the combination of e-commerce and the profit imperative
has weakened many a thriving newspaper. The Spotlight team doesn’t unravel the
Diocese’s sins without the commitment of time and funds that the Globe was
willing to shower upon it. It’s a fact that is often ignored by evangelists of
a predominantly freelance journalism world. Twitter might provide greater access
to instant communications. Blogs might bestow independent power upon
prospective truth-tellers. But neither of these outlets (let alone the “more
with less” edict that has swept so many institutions in this country) can
provide the investigative depth and heft of a well-supported journalistic
endeavor.

There was a time in our country
when we regarded The Fourth Estate as a public service, integral to the maintenance
of the democracy and the common good. Of course, there was also a time when we
regarded the church (whether it be Catholic or Protestant) as a generally
infallible presence in the preservation of that same common good. Tradition
cuts both ways like that. The Catholic Diocese of Boston might have covered up
the actions of pedophilic priests, but in one of the most sad, disturbing
scenes of Spotlight, the mother of an
abuse victim admits that the greatest pressure on her to keep her mouth shut
came not from the clergy, but from her fellow parishioners. A few people in
their early 20’s that I know who have seen this film marvel at the concept of
the Catholic Church wielding such power over a community, and over the city
being dominated by such a clannish cultural imperative. But their experience of
Boston is the more multi-cultural, worldly city that exists today, the one whose
major sports icons have hailed from the Dominican Republic. Yet under that
gleaming, diverse surface, the Ivy League legacies still exist, and
gentrification continues to push minorities and the economic majority out of
the central hubs of the city. Spotlight
serves as a powerful reminder of a time that is not as distant as it might
seem, a point that’s hammered home in the pre-credits graphics that list all of
the cities worldwide in which Catholic sex abuse scandals have been uncovered
in the years after the film’s events. We might live in an era of relentless
change, but tradition still wields a powerful siren song, one whose sometimes
damaging consequences are often all too easy to ignore.